Текст книги "Passenger"

Автор книги: Andrew Smith

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

five

It was awkward climbing up that ladder.

The rungs hurt my bare feet and I could only work with one hand. My bandaged palm stayed hitched on the waistband of those goddamned shorts Quinn gave me. They ended up tangled around my ankles on top of the first step, and that redheaded bastard poked his face in the hatch and hissed a whispered laugh at me.

Balancing with my knees propped against one rung, I flipped him off, and Quinn laughed again.

“Come take a look at this, Odd. Tell me if you never seen it before.”

The roof of the firehouse was a flat deck of some sort, surrounded by a waist-high cinderblock wall that extended up from the perimeter of the station. At one time, I could imagine firemen enjoying a pleasant day up here. Maybe when the world was different.

I sat at the edge of the open hatch, and then brought my feet up onto the roof before trying to stand. The sky was just going to nighttime dark in Marbury, a milky gray, the color of a rotten tooth. Quinn stood back, and faced away from me with his chin tilted upward.

“See that?” he said.

I looked up.

And, in what dark the Marbury night made for us, standing there beside Quinn Cahill on the roof of an abandoned firehouse that had become his sanctuary in hell, I saw the hole in the sky.

Overhead in the east, above the business district where the kid had pushed us in a canoe past Java and Jazz, there was a gash—a knife wound through the gray. The thing bled vacant light that seemed to spill downward like a waterfall and blind out the foggy haze around it; a liquid constellation, some kind of fire that rained down from nowhere and everywhere.

“What do you think that is?” Quinn asked.

I just shook my head.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Odd. Like I said, when it happened things got worse. The Rangers been coming through trying to get anything they can take. Some of them’s even headed out now, just leaving here altogether. Seems like, to be honest, there’s more suckers, more Hunters, harvesters, and more of us dying. And I believe Fent’s crew is getting ready to go too, and leave us all—what’s left of us—to the Hunters. But those next few days after it happened, the Rangers rode through, roughing up all the Odds that were too young to conscript, and you know what some of them do to us who are older, don’t you? They were looking for you. Jack Whitmore. See? I knew your name before you even said it, Billy. And they were trying to find your friend, too. They said you did something to him. Why do you suppose that is? You weren’t just a prisoner, were you?”

When Quinn made his case, something started to connect in my head, but I couldn’t feel it coming together. It was like those times when I’d look back through images—photographs that Nickie had taken of me—riding on a river cruise, touring London, doing things with her while I was in Marbury, while I was here—but I couldn’t quite get the memory to surface.

I leaned my arms on the edge of the block wall and watched as the thing pulsed overhead in the sky. The kid knew things about me and Conner, and he was playing a game, they way you’d play with a hooked fish on a line.

Quinn knew more about Marbury than I ever did.

I had fallen into another pit inside my nightmare, a deeper layer, and nothing was finished yet. We all fell—me, Conner, Ben, and Griffin.

“You have to believe me, Quinn. I just can’t remember what happened.”

“All right, Odd.”

I heard music playing.

Crazy Jack dreams up all kinds of shit.

And sometimes it’s accompanied by music.

I held my breath.

I had to be out of my mind.

It sounded so far away, floating: a jangling, grinding, metallic sound, the wheezing strains of a high-pitched organ.

“Do you hear that?” Quinn said.

“I don’t know what it is,” I whispered. “It sounds like a circus.”

Musical monsters.

“It’s Fent.”

Quinn nudged my shoulder and then went back toward the place where the hatch lay open. “Time for us to settle in, Billy.”

*   *   *

We sat on our beds, across from each other, and listened to the music as it got louder at times, and then drifted away like a wind.

I’d been scared plenty of times—in Marbury, and in other places—but there was something about that music and the thought of it being connected to someone who was looking for me and Conner that was more unnerving than anything else I could remember.

“Why do they do it?” I said.

“The music? Fent just wants us Odds to know they’re coming. Hunters, too. I guess it saves the Rangers on ammunition. Everyone runs from them.”

“Do they know about this place?”

“Of course they do, Odd.”

The music was clearer now. It sounded, ridiculously enough, like a single small accordion; the kind they call a concertina.

“It doesn’t scare you they know about you?”

“You really don’t know nothing, do you?” Quinn sighed. “Join or die, Billy. Join or die. They don’t fuck with the Odds till we turn sixteen. Well, except for the depraved ones, they don’t. Or till we look like we’re sixteen.”

Quinn shifted on his bed, leaning toward me, leering. “How old are you, anyway? Heh-heh.”

That explained some of it, I guess.

“How old do I look?”

“You? You look like you’ve been around for a really long time, Odd.”

He was fucking with me again.

I wanted to get out of there. If I didn’t get away from Quinn, as good as things might be at his firehouse, I was certain he was going to push me into doing something bad.

I lay down and stretched my legs across the cot. I was completely exhausted.

“What do you want me to do if they show up?”

Quinn got up from bed and lowered the mantle on the oil lamp.

It was as black as if I’d shut my eyes, but they were wide open. I could hear his bare feet padding across the floor, the squeak of his bedsprings as he sat down again on his cot.

“Don’t be scared, Odd. I’ll take care of you. I can handle Fent and the Rangers. If they show up tonight, you just get up on the roof. You’ll be safe there till I come get you. Okay?”

I gritted my teeth, forced the words from my constricted throat. “Thanks, Quinn.”

“Don’t worry about them.”

“Okay.”

I remembered something.

And I told him.

“There’s a settlement across a desert. They call it Bass-Hove. You ever hear of such a place? There are people in it. Real people who don’t call themselves Odds. There’s girls, too. They still have some power there. Trains. Locomotives that take people out, to another city. A fortress behind big walls, named Grove. Did you ever know anything about those places? That’s where the Rangers are going.”

I had seen it all before. I had been to those places, could still feel the gritty, windless heat of the air at the Bass-Hove Settlement, could picture the sheer walls of the fortified city at Grove, where Conner and I took the other boys after we’d crossed the mountains.

“You’re making that shit up, Billy.”

I heard him roll over onto his side and exhale a tired breath of air.

And I was certain he knew exactly what I was talking about.

*   *   *

The Rangers came that night.

I was hard asleep, and at first I felt Quinn’s hot breath against my ear when he whispered, “Billy. Billy, wake up.”

He shook my chest gently, and I thought it had to be a weird dream.

I dreamed of being on the water again.

“Psst! Billy!”

Then I heard the music, louder now, the squeal of the concertina wheezing in and out, in and out.

It sounded as if it were right outside the firehouse door.

“Huh?” I shot up in my bed, disoriented, everything swirling and smearing like a watercolor painting that had been left out in a summer storm—Glenbrook, here, there, Marbury, my friends, the Odds, Quinn Cahill.

“Shhhhh … Quiet now, Odd.”

Quinn’s mouth was so close to my ear I could feel his lips moving. “Remember what I said. Get up the ladder now. Come on, get humping, Odd. They probably just want some water. I got to go down and talk to them.”

I stood, shaky and weak.

Quinn lit a lamp. The kid lifted the lid on the footlocker. I heard him flip the switch inside it—his electric fence. Then he nodded at the ladder and went out the door and downstairs to the entryway.

This was it, I thought.

I started toward the ladder, holding my shorts up as I walked. Then, I’m not sure why I did it, but I looked back at the room. And I thought, If they come up here and see two beds have been slept in, they’ll know somebody else is here. Quinn can’t be that stupid.

He’s fucking with you, Jack.

So I went back and pulled the blanket and sheet from my bed.

The music outside stopped.

I tossed my pillow across to Quinn’s cot and I grabbed my pants and boots from the floor where I’d hidden them under my bed. I even slipped my hand inside to make sure the broken lens was still tucked into my pocket.

Same old Jack, no matter where he is.

And as I bundled my things in the bedsheet, I got the idea that I should leave. I glanced at the door, strained to hear anything, but it was all so quiet. I jumped across to Quinn’s closet and slipped inside. I didn’t bother to look, I grabbed as much as I thought I could carry—cans, mostly—and one plastic water jug.

My hand ached, but I got everything up that ladder and onto the roof.

Then I shut the hatch behind me.

I stripped out of the shorts and got back into my pants. I hooked up my belt, could feel the weight of that knife, as it slapped against my thigh when I laced up the boots.

Sure you used to have a knife like this one, Quinn. That’s because you left it at that old man’s house, didn’t you?

I put the shorts he’d given me, and everything I stole from him, inside the blanket. Then I tied the corners into a tight bundle that I slipped over one arm. I knotted my sheets together and thought about how stupid I was, because this stuff never worked in real life, did it?

Yeah. This is real life.

I secured one end of my sheet-rope to the bar on the outside of the hatch and then threw the end that was probably going to break my leg in the best case, or kill me in the worst, over the side of the firehouse.

And even if I made it to the very end, I estimated I’d still have to drop ten feet—and that would be from a full-out stretch. So I clenched and re-clenched my injured right hand, wondering if I could hold my own weight; wondering what kind of shit was down there for Jack to land on.

But before I’d go over the edge, I had to see what was going on.

Just a peek.

You’re an idiot, Jack.

I went to the front of the deck and looked down.

I could see Quinn, standing awkward and scrawny, naked except for a pair of baggy gym shorts, so he looked like he was maybe twelve years old. And he was talking to a group of soldiers—six or seven of them at least—who were mounted on horses that nervously twitched and shifted, rolling their eyes and throwing their heads back like they knew if they stood still too long the Hunters would come. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Quinn was holding out his white arms, palms up, like he was imploring the riders to believe him. I wondered which one was Fent.

I found myself looking again, mesmerized by the pulsing slash of light where Quinn theorized something had fallen out of the sky. And something about that mark in the sky looked familiar to me—like I was supposed to remember it.

He said it happened seven days ago.

Maybe Conner came through first. Maybe he knew what was going on, only Marbury Jack hadn’t tuned in yet, like Ben and Griffin hadn’t.

Maybe they were still falling through, and that was why they didn’t know who I was when they found me in their garage.

Shit, maybe the boys were still at home in Glenbrook—the real Glenbrook—watching while stupid Jack takes a swing at the only glue holding the entire universe together.

Jack did it again.

I had tried to make things right, to help my friends by splitting the lens. And just like most of Jack’s other fixes, things only ended up broken worse than ever.

Seven days, seven years, it could all be an eyeblink here, a sneeze. So Conner left those messages for me at the old man’s house, knowing I was coming. Sooner or later.

And out in the blank tract of nothing between here and the dust-covered highway, I saw a blazing line of red coming west toward the Rangers and Quinn’s firehouse.

I saw the Hunters coming.

And that was enough for Jack.

I crossed the roof.

I do not pray. I have never prayed for anything. But when I grabbed on to the cord of sheeting and lifted my right leg over the edge, I shut my eyes tightly and silently repeated one name in my head: Nickie.

Then I went over the side.

And with each grasping hold, as I struggled to lower myself a foot at a time, pinching the sheets so desperately between my crossed ankles, I thought: Conner, Ben, Griffin, Seth.

I have to get back. I have to make things real again.

*   *   *

I tore open my hand when I climbed down from the firehouse roof.

The bandages and tape Quinn had so carefully wrapped around the cut soaked through with blood and pus that separated like light in a prism as the fluids migrated through the gauze and formed layers of colors—the broken-down spectrum of the stuff inside of Jack.

It hurt so bad that my nose ran with clear snot and my eyes watered. But I didn’t break my leg. I made it down.

The bundle of food and water I’d slung over my shoulder was awkward and painful to carry, but I could do nothing about it. I dreamed of stumbling across some little kid’s wagon to put it in; I fantasized about finding my truck, still full of gas, sliding in, my skin resting in the cool cradle of leather seats, turning on the stereo, tapping the wheel as I drove somewhere that wasn’t here.

I kept moving. And I remember how my shoulders tensed, hunched up toward my neck on either side when I heard all the shooting start, off behind me somewhere in the direction of Quinn’s palace.

So I justified in my mind that either the Rangers or the Hunters would have ended up with a trophy of Jack if I’d stayed behind. I was convinced that Quinn Cahill, the survivor like no other, would be fine and would slip back into his routine—maybe “following me,” maybe just lying about it, but always winning his game.

And after I’d made it past the schoolhouse and crossed the dead darkness of what had at one time been a highway, I thought, Please, do not start raining on me now.

Two ghosts ran out in front of me, a boy and a girl, holding hands, barefoot, trailing wisps of luminescent fog like the unexplainable thing in the sky. They vanished in three short steps, and I kept thinking about how bothered Ben used to get over the ghosts in Marbury; how much he hated them.

Jack was going home.

*   *   *

I saw no other living thing that night as I passed through the ruins of the town, making my way toward the vacant miles of bare land that would have been vineyards at some other time.

This was the right place—I knew it—but there were no roads, no markers. Here, it was just drifts of soft ash that had taken over the undulating hills where Wynn and Stella grew grapes.

Occasionally, I’d see “things”—souvenirs of a past here: the lid from a galvanized-steel trash can, a mail delivery truck burned and tipped onto its side, half buried, twists of mangled wrought iron, and the strangest objects—bricks. There were bricks and cinderblocks scattered everywhere, randomly, patternless, as though anything that had been made of them just separated and flew in different directions.

They could have fallen from the sky, too.

But I wondered if maybe they were the remains of the walls that had surrounded Wynn’s property.

And, just when the morning broke, pale and ulcerous, I saw the house.

It wasn’t the house I noticed at first, but the huge oak tree in front of it—the one I used to park my truck under. But it wasn’t a tree anymore. It was nothing more than a hollow, black log that stuck straight up through the white ash, barely taller than I was and wide enough across that I could have laid down inside it.

There was the house.

It was my house, wasn’t it?

I think I stood against the husk of that oak tree for ten minutes just looking at it, trying to decide whether or not Jack had the balls to go inside.

It was coated in dust, the fine, sticky, annoying kind like you get from the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag. At one time Wynn and Stella’s house had been a kind of peach color—all the houses in Glenbrook seemed to be painted that color—but now it had turned the same dull, rotten-meat shade of nothing that covered everything, everywhere.

The windows had all been broken. None of them were boarded. I already had learned enough here to know it meant nobody was alive. Not ever, probably. Sections of the roof had sloughed away.

But it was the same house where Jack was born on the floor in his grandparents’ perfect kitchen.

You can’t shoot an arrow anywhere and not aim at the center of the universe.

The boards were gone from the steps to the porch. I had to launch myself over the frame of the staircase from the bottom. I nearly dropped the satchel of food I was carrying, and I could hear the crotch ripping out of the jeans I wore.

Just great, I thought. I don’t have any clothes and now my only pair of pants is coming apart, too.

The house was closed up.

Like the old man’s house, all the hardware had been removed from the doors, and the leaded windows were broken out. When I pushed in against the front doors, the milky plumes of dust that rose up from the floor made it look like films you’d see of divers entering a stateroom in some long-sunken liner at the bottom of a cold ocean.

Welcome home, Jack.

I know it was stupid, but I almost choked when I stopped myself from calling my grandparents’ names.

“Hey!”

Maybe there was a breeze raking over the jagged fangs of glass that jabbed out from the window frames upstairs, but I could hear a faint, hushed sigh—like someone was sleeping—breathing, whispering through the house.

“Is anybody in here?”

Down the hallway on the left side of the stairway—that was Wynn’s room, where he would sit and watch television—I could see trails in the dust on the floor.

Things had been dragged.

“Hello?”

A curled brass light fixture, like a finger, a meat hook, dangled against the wall from its wires; the oak wainscoting had been pried away, the ragged splinters piled into a forbidding X where they crossed in front of the open doorway.

Shhhhhh …

Something was upstairs.

Maybe I was crazy.

Maybe I just needed sleep, but my heart shot up into my throat and I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like I didn’t want to, because I was afraid I’d make too much noise. And I cursed myself for having shouted my entry calls in the first place.

I was hot and cold at the same time, felt that feverish sickness of sweat on the back of my neck.

Quietly, I placed the bundled things I’d stolen from Quinn down on the floor, next to my feet.

I pushed the front doors shut behind me.

Shhhhhh …

I put my foot on the first stair.

How nice. Jack wants to go back to his old room.

Maybe he’ll find something there to play with.

The stairs compressed under my feet, moaning. I walked along the wall. I was afraid they’d collapse in a rotten heap below me.

I was afraid.

This is stupid, I thought. There’s nothing here.

It was my house.

But it wasn’t my house.

At the top of the stairs, I glanced down the hallway. There was the bathroom, two guest rooms. One of them we called “Conner’s room,” because he was the only guest who ever slept in it. The light came in through the open doors from gaping window frames that spilled grayness across the floor of dust around me.

More signs that things—someone, maybe—had been dragged in the hallway, leaving nervous train tracks cleared through the dust on the floor.

*   *   *

At the opposite end of the hall, behind me, is Jack’s room.

The door is shut.

A dim line, a crack of light.

I wait, listen.

A creak in the floor; I feel the vibration in the soles of my feet like I’m standing on an anthill. There is someone in my room; I am certain of it.

I think about the lens.

Jack always thinks about the lens.

I take it from my pocket and hold it just so it catches the little thing that squirms beneath the door.

Jack’s door.

And for a moment, there is something in the lens, and it is gone again.

We have come to the right place.

Aching, I wrestle the knife from its sheath, pass it over to my left hand.

Nobody’s allowed in my room when I’m not here.

It isn’t my room.

And here I am.

I push the door open and stand back.

Welcome home, Jack.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

*   *   *

“Seth?” I whispered.

Nothing.

I was afraid to step foot inside my own room.

It’s not your room.

The wind made a hoosh through the window.

I put one foot inside.

The door slammed open by itself. It crashed into the wall and made an angry dent in the boards. I didn’t touch it. I could hear the screws in the hinges ripping at the wood.

Hoosh.

I held the fragment of the Marbury lens in front of me, like it was some kind of shield, and I swung it across my path, trying to see if it would pick up anything there in my room.

“Seth?” My voice was barely a breath.

I went inside.

“Can you help me?”

The door slammed shut.

Outside, rain began to fall.

As ridiculous as it all was, my room was still my room.

There was my bed. The sheets were missing, and one of the legs from the frame had collapsed, so the corner sagged down into the inch-thick dust on the floor. And there was dried blood at the foot end of the mattress.

Jack’s blood.

From your ankle.

Remember that, Jack? How Freddie Horvath pinned your ankle to the bed frame using those sharp nylon bands?

The mirror had been shattered. There was one triangular piece jutting up from the bottom, and I could see my hand in it.

My hand was bleeding again, shaking, holding the lens.

Rain.

Sweat.

Lightning, and an explosion of thunder that nearly knocked me backwards.

I sat on the bed—my bed—and looked into the piece of mirror.

I put the lens back into my pocket; slid the knife into its sheath.

I watched the sheets of rain outside that waved their slate fibers like torn theatre scrims.

*   *   *

This is real.

In the mirror, I can only see my hands and knees. The gap between my legs. There would be something there, at least in Jack’s world. Between the mattress and foundation of the bed, right in that corner.

It is the spot where Jack hid the lenses. I know where they are.

The last time we’d seen Seth, as he vanished, blue lenses fell on the spot beneath his faint image. Conner knows about them, even if I’ve been hiding them from him and the others.

I watch the mirror. I can see my unbandaged hand slip into the crack.

Something drags on the floor, cutting through the dust.

A finger, maybe.

It makes a drawing of an arrow that points to me, points away in the mirror.

I find it, Jack’s stupid old sock, and, inside, there is something and it feels alive.

I can tell you, at that moment, when my hand found that wound-up sock hidden in my bed, I felt jangly and giddy—like the first time I touched Nickie’s bare skin—I didn’t know whether I was going to laugh or throw up, or whether my heart was going to explode.

I couldn’t catch my breath. I unwound the sock and slipped my fingers inside.

I felt something, but it was not the same lenses Jack had left there. For a moment, my mind flashed on the image of a harvester twisted up inside the sock, waiting for a meal, or maybe one of those black slugs.

Crash.

The lightning came again.

I pulled my hand out.

There were eyeglasses. But these things were like nothing I’d ever seen before. They were beautiful and terrifying to look at; kind of like Henry’s glasses were the first time I’d touched them when I sat alone at a table in The Prince of Wales, so long ago.

And these were different.

They were like goggles: loose, with a leather strap rather than stiff metal arms, and the eyepieces were cupped and vented. And each one of the lenses had been inlaid with dark blue glass the color of lapis, with round metal stems coming out from the top and bottom, like they were cooling tubes or pipes that carried some element into and out of the eyepiece.

They were made from the same pieces of glass, the lenses Seth had left for us in Marbury or, at least, they looked the same.

I guess we would never know for certain.

Attached to the left lens was a second, smaller, green monocle that was screwed into a double-action hinge system, so it could swivel up and down or pivot outward like a door.

I can’t lie about it. It was exciting, and I didn’t care if it killed me.

I needed it.

Maybe it was a way home.

My hands shook and my belly knotted.

And when I held the lenses up, there was nothing remarkable I saw through either side.

Nothing.

Just blue glass.

So I put them on. Then I flipped the outer lens into place and opened my eyes.

And Jack was gone.

*   *   *

I could tell you that I knew it was going to happen, and I would be lying.

But you would believe me.